The earth’s climate is changing at a rate unprecedented in recent human history and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The impacts and risks associated with this are global, geographically diverse and increasingly being felt across a range of systems and sectors essential for human livelihoods and well-being. The more severe and far-reaching the impacts of climate change are, the greater the loss of species will be, and the greater the deterioration of drylands and the risk of desertification and land degradation around the world will be.

The year 2012 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, which resulted in the establishment of the three Rio Conventions: the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD ) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC ).

International policy and decision makers now recognize that the link between environmental change and migration has grave consequences for human security. The paradigm of security has shifted away from purely state-centered models to a model that encompasses the greater idea of human development as freedom. The new model implies greater international awareness of the importance of sustainable development for all people – including an intact environment and the ability of all people to enjoy good health and respectable work.

Aquellos que formulan políticas y decisiones internacionales reconocen que la relación entre el cambio medioambiental y la migración tiene graves consecuencias para la seguridad humana. El paradigma de la seguridad se ha alejado de los modelos centrados exclusivamente en el Estado para acercase a un patrón que contempla una idea más amplia: la del desarrollo humano como modelo de libertad.

As the world reviews its progress in tackling global poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), drylands can no longer be ignored. Drylands account for more than a third of the world’s land surface and more than 2 billion of its people. Yet for too long, drylands and their inhabitants have been neglected in development processes.

Water cooperation has received prominent focus in the post-2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While proposals for measuring water cooperation appear to be converging toward a small set of indicators, the degree to which these proposed indicators draw on past work is unclear. This paper mines relevant past work to generate guidance for monitoring the proposed SDG target related to transboundary water cooperation. Potential measures of water cooperation were identified, filtered and applied in three countries (Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe).

Northern Bangladesh is a remote region which was excluded from the Green Revolution and today remains “ultra-poor”. There is a saying in the area that the most fortunate people live in Dhaka and Chittagong in the south of the country and the most distressed people live in North Bengal (Northern regions of Bangladesh). North Bangladesh presents a paradox of being too close to the Indian border, which had facilitated trade and commerce in the undivided colonial Bengal, and too far away from Dhaka, the nerve centre of policy, decision-making and politics in Bangladesh.